Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence

by Gregory A. Boyd

it seems unfaithful for us to question the altogether loving character of God that is revealed in the crucified Christ.

This leaves us with only one remaining possibility: If we believe that Jesus fully reveals what God is really like, we have no choice but to suspect that something else must be goingon when God appears to act violently in the OT.

In fact, when interpreted through the looking-glass cross, the violence that OT authors sometimes ascribe to God no longer bears witness to a violent God; it rather bears witness to the self-sacrificial, nonviolent God who was supremely revealed on the cross.

The only way to discover the beauty that lies on the other side of a mountain of ugliness is to courageously confront and work through it.

But isn’t it disingenuous to refrain from calling this same depiction “ugly” simply because it’s found in your holy book rather than in someone else’s?

On top of this, numerous studies have shown that violent depictions of God in literature that is regarded as sacred make believers more inclined toward violence.

Even more problematic, however, was that I had come to understand that, according to Jesus, all Scripture is supposed to point to him, and especially to his sacrificial suffering on the cross.

On the authority of Jesus, I had to affirm that the whole OT is divinely inspired. But also on the authority of Jesus, I could no longer accept the violence that some narratives within this divinely inspired book ascribe to God.

Notice that Moses didn’t stipulate that these soldiers had to marry a virgin captive before having sex with her. Throughout the Ancient Near East (ANE), and, unfortunately, throughout much of history, raping the women of a conquered people group was assumed to be a soldier’s reward for victory. But even if we assume marriage was implied, imagine having to spend the rest of your life sexually gratifying the soldier who helped murder your family and tribe.[13]

I hope you agree that it’s not wise to try to preserve strong families by killing disobedient children! And so I hope you’re beginning to suspect that something else was going on when God breathed these barbarically violent laws into his written word.

As morally revolting as these portraits of God are, if we confess Jesus to be Lord, I believe we are obliged to confess that all of them, together with the entire canon, are God-breathed. But at the same time, if we confess Jesus to be Lord, we also should feel obliged to insist that something else is going on when God’s breathing results in biblical authors ascribing such atrocities to God, for these depictions of God contradict what we learn about God in Jesus’s cross-centered life and ministry.

Origen taught that when we come upon a biblical passage that seems unworthy of God, we must humble ourselves before God and ask the Spirit to help us find a deeper meaning in the passage that is worthy of God.

M. Beier, A Violent God-Image: An Introduction to the Work of Eugen Drewermann (New York: Continuum, 2004); D. Daschke and A. Kille, eds., A Cry Instead of Justice: The Bible and Cultures of Violence in Psychological Perspective (New York: T&T Clark, 2010); R. S. Hess and E. A. Martens, eds., War in the Bible and Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008), and Jenkins, Laying Down the Sword, 15. ↵

It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of a believer’s mental representation of God, for the way you imagine God largely determines the quality of your relationship with God. The intensity of your love for God will never outrun the beauty of the God you envision. Related to this, the depth of your transformation into the likeness of Christ will never outrun the Christlikeness of your mental representation of God.

For example, it’s a neurological fact that people who have a loving mental representation of God tend to have a greater capacity to think objectively about controversial matters and to make rational decisions than do people who have a threatening mental representation of God.[4]

all Scripture is divinely inspired, they think, it must all carry the same level of divine authority. In this view, which some refer to as “the flat view of the Bible,” Jesus’s revelation of God is placed on the same level as all other biblical depictions of God, creating a montage mental conception of God. That is, part of the God these Christians envision is Christlike, but other

I’m now persuaded that the Bible itself instructs us to base our mental representation of God solely on Jesus Christ. Other

Vern Poythress and others are thus on the mark when they conclude that Jesus is claiming that “the whole Old Testament . . . speaks of Christ.”[12] Hence, the only proper way to “study the Scripture diligently” is to study it in a way that discloses how all of it is about Jesus and thus in a way that leads us to the life of Scripture.

We should therefore regard Jesus as the key that unlocks the revelatory content of every passage of Scripture, as numerous scholars have argued.

And we can only see how all Scripture “testifies to Christ” when we read Scripture through this lens. This is what I’m doing to the OT’s violent portraits of God: I’m asking, how do these sometimes horrifically ugly portraits testify to Christ when interpreted through the looking-glass of Jesus’s life, and especially of his sacrificial death?

Everything we need to know and can know about God is found in Christ.

In other words, the OT’s revelatory authority for us is found in its Christ-pointing function, period. Like Jesus said, the OT is all about him, and he is the life that it is intended to point to.

Is this an overstatement?

Similar to the astonishing claim that Jesus made in Matthew 11:27, John is using hyperbole to claim that the revelation of God in Christ is so superior to all that preceded him that it’s as though no one had any knowledge of God before the Son made him known. And this is why John refers to the Son as the “one and only.” He is utterly unique in his capacity to reveal God.

But Jesus displayed a more relaxed attitude toward the Sabbath, even defending his disciples when they violated a law that prohibited harvesting food on the Sabbath (Mark 2:23–28).

Jesus viewed the OT as a divinely inspired authority that was under, not alongside, his own divine authority.

Unfortunately, Augustine defined love as an inner attitude that did not have any necessary implications for how we actually treat others.[2]

This same ambiguity attaches to God’s love in Augustine’s writings. For example, Augustine was the first Christian to teach that, while God is perfect love, he nevertheless predestined every atrocity in history and even predestined the majority of humans to suffer forever in hell! Which again makes me wonder: If this is what a God of perfect love does, what would a less loving God do? Not predestine the majority to hell?

We might say that the cross is the definitive revelation of God’s cross-like, or cruciform, character.

The cruciform through-line of Jesus’s ministry is reflected throughout the Gospels as well.

This stern rebuke demonstrates that the cruciform conception of power that runs throughout Jesus’s ministry and that is supremely expressed on the cross is “the antithesis of the self-oriented power that the devil offered the Son of God.”[10]

in the way he reverses some of the OT’s covenantal blessings (which, we should note, also further illustrates Jesus’s superior authority to the OT).

In short, children of the Father are to love others indiscriminately and unconditionally, for this alone reflects the character of the Father, as it is most perfectly revealed on the cross. ***

Covenant obedience in view at all?

It’s important to note, however, that there’s a world of difference between choosing out of love to suffer for another, and being forced to suffer at the hands of another. Following Jesus rules out resorting to violence against an abuser, but it also rules out enabling an abuser.

This is also why Paul could tell the Corinthians that he “resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). This statement reflects Paul’s assumption that, if you understand the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion, you understand everything you need to know about God and about the gospel.

Second, it means that our mental picture of God should not merely be anchored in Christ; it should be anchored in Christ crucified.

Which is to say, there is no aspect of God that is not characterized by the nonviolent, self- sacrificial, enemy-embracing love that is revealed on the cross.

How do macabre portraits of God, such as the portrait of Yahweh commanding Israelites to mercilessly engage in genocide, reflect and point to the nonviolent, self-sacrificial, enemy- embracing love of God that is supremely revealed on the cross?

In fact, the very attempt to defend the violence ascribed to God in these portraits indicates that we still believe that God is capable of this sort of behavior, which in turn indicates that we do not yet fully trust that the crucified Christ is the full revelation of God’s true character.

You’d also expect that this messiah was going to crack down on sinners and call the Jewish people back to their nationalistic, law-based covenant.

I would not. How does covenant fit in this?

Nor did Jesus crack down on sinners and call people back to their nationalistic, law-based covenant. Rather, he repudiated aspects of the law, hung out with sinners, and cracked down on those legalistic religious leaders who were always cracking down on sinners.

Hmmmm... seems like Jesus came to fulfill the law.

The question is: How does the crucified Christ become the supreme revelation of God for us?

We might think of the cross along the lines of a two-way mirror in which you are able to look through your own reflection and see what is taking place on the other side of the mirror—but only if the other side of the mirror is lit up. Otherwise you only see your own reflection. So too, the faith of believers lightens up what is going on behind the scenes of the crucifixion. It thus allows them to see through the ugly sin-mirroring surface of the cross to behold God

This is why the cross is for believers both the revelation of the revolting ugliness of our sin and the revelation of the supremely beautiful God who was willing to stoop to take on this revolting ugliness.

Along the same lines, we should expect that the something else that is going on behind the scenes of these sin-mirroring portraits is precisely what is going on behind the sin-mirroring cross: God, out of his love, is humbly stooping to bear the sin of his people, thereby taking on an ugly appearance that reflects this sin. This is how I propose we interpret all portraits of God in the Bible that on the surface reflect a character that is inconsistent with the cruciform character of God revealed on the cross, including especially the OT’s violent depictions of God.[2]

We might say that violent divine portraits become literary crucifixes that bear witness to the historical crucifixion when interpreted through the looking-glass cross.

Now, if you’re outside on a day when you can only catch glimpses of the sun, it means it’s a mostly cloudy day. So, as we read the OT, we should remain aware that these authors had a rather cloudy vision of God.

So why on earth would we ever place more trust in someone who had a cloudy vision of God’s glory than we place in the one who is himself the very radiance of God’s glory?

This seems like a boarder line antisemitic conclusion. Israel had covenant relationship with Yahweh. They knew God and trusted him. Their interpretation and interactions (experiential) are equally valid. We are not “over” them.

But the all-important question is, what did God inspire the Bible to infallibly accomplish?

This explains why Scripture contains a prescientific cosmology, historical inaccuracies, contradictions, and other sorts of human imperfections. While these fallible qualities are devastating if you’re expecting Scripture to meet a presupposed human standard of perfection, they are to be expected if we instead assess our divinely inspired Scripture by the standard of the cross.[5]

The second way my proposal builds upon church tradition centers on my conviction that we should interpret the OT through the lens of the cross instead of restricting ourselves to the authors’ originally intended meaning. To many readers this will sound new, for it conflicts with the widespread conservative assumption that the only meaning a text should have for us today is the meaning that it had for the original audience.